Fowler tried harder but was only the second flier to cross the nation by airplane

Who remembers Miss America's runner-up, or second place in the Indy 500, or the last person tossed off the island?

And you probably never heard of Robert G. Fowler, the second man to fly across the United States.

Fowler was one of those fearless, and foolhardy, pilots in the years after the Wright Brothers' flight who would try just about anything.

When publisher William Randolph Hearst put up $50,000 for the first person to fly across the continent in 30 days, the 28-year-old Fowler was up for the adventure.

He began Sept. 11, 1911, flying without incident from San Francisco to Sacramento.

The first of a long series of problems struck the next day when high winds caused him to crash into a Sierra Nevada forest.

Fowler and his crew quickly rebuilt the plane in a few days and unsuccessfully tried two more times to cross the Sierras before he decided to start over following the more level southern route.

On Oct. 19, he took off near Los Angeles Country Club, got lost in fog near Whittier and barely made a safe landing in semi-darkness at Tournament Park in Pasadena.

Two days later, all eyes in the Inland Valley were skyward in hopes of glimpsing his plane, something most local people had never before seen.

At about 11 a.m., almost an hour after leaving Pasadena, Fowler's plane was sighted west of Ontario, following A Street (today's Holt Avenue) and the Southern Pacific tracks.

"It was a beautiful sight to see the ship skim through the air hundreds of feet above all heads," wrote the Ontario Republican that afternoon.

"He was low enough for the thousands of sky lookers to see every little movement of the motor ship" before it disappeared to the east.

Fowler reached Yuma five days later - the first person to fly a plane into what was still Arizona Territory - and Tucson on Oct. 30.

There he decided to wait for the plane of Calbraith Rodgers, who would beat Fowler for the honor of being the first across the country by plane.

The westbound Rodgers arrived in Tucson on Nov. 2.

The two fliers exchanged some greetings - the exhausted Rodgers was reportedly less than cordial - then took off in opposite directions.

Fowler pushed on - with bad luck still his co-pilot.

In the middle of a shortcut across the Mexican border not far from El Paso, his engine forced him down in soft sand, according to "The Life and Times of Robert G. Fowler," a book by Maria Schell Burden.

The crew cut the plane into three parts and hauled it 1 1/2 miles to a train line.

They reassembled the plane and moved it onto the tracks atop a wheeled cart, figuring this would enable the plane to get up enough speed to take off.

Then, out of nowhere, appeared a freight train on the same track as Fowler's plane.

He desperately urged his plane in the air, barely clearing the top of the train, which smashed the pushcart into kindling.